An inventory for assessing the behavioural covariates of craving in heroin substance use disorder. Development, theoretical description, reliability, exploratory factor analysis and preliminary construct validity

Introduction: No room is currently being allocated in the literature to correlations between patients’ craving for heroin and their actual addictive behaviours, due to the fact that research is focused instead on risk behaviours leading to infectious diseases and the risks being incurred through overdoses. Methods: An expert panel open to rehabilitated patients built an inventory to assess craving behaviours in heroin use disorder patients. We administered it to a sample of 114 ‘typical respondents’, with the aim of testing the value of the various items in the inventory in demonstrating their discriminative effect, their reliability, and the existence of behavioural clusters. We tested the sensitivity of our inventory (its preliminary construct validity) by comparing groups each of which could be expected to be prone to a different type of craving. Results: The inventory demonstrated good internal consistency (reliability) across the sample. This high level of internal consistency suggests that the items measure the craving construct. Preliminary split-test data showed acceptable agreement for the subset of items examined. Preliminary construct validity was established through significant association in the expected direction observed for the utilized variables in identifying the modalities of heroin use. Preliminary factor analysis suggests that this inventory is unidimensional. Conclusions: The inventory appears to qualify as a tool that may be able to evaluate craving in patients with heroin use disorder through their addictive behaviours. © Icro Maremmani.